Windows Vista & IE7 Beta 1 Available

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid.

—IEBlog Editor, 21 August 2012

Beta versions of both Windows Vista (formerly codenamed “Longhorn”) and IE7
for Windows XP are now available. Back in
February we committed to releasing betas this summer. I’m sure it
surprises some people, but we did what we said we’d do.

How interested you are in actually running pre-release software should
depend on who you are. For example, I think that running pre-release
MSN Virtual Earth or the
Windows Antispyware Beta is interesting for everyone. I think
NetScan is less interesting for broad audiences.

The beta versions of
Windows Vista and
IE7 that have just released should be interesting to developers and IT
professionals. For this reason, the beta is available to MSDN subscribers
and a pretty small set of pre-enrolled beta test participants. Our goal is
to get feedback from this group, do a bunch more work around quality
(performance, security, reliability, etc.) and some features (e.g.
additional standards support beyond what’s in
beta 1, additional functionality around tabs and RSS, etc.), and release
Beta 2 much more broadly.